Why the Hindu nationalist Jagran group runs the Urdu daily Inquilab

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• Dainik Jagran’s ground reportage was minimal. The violence did not make the lead story on any of the key days. Meanwhile, the paper’s articles freely linked the CAA protests with the riots without any evidence. A front-page report on 25 February concluded that Shaheen Bagh—which is altogether in a different part of Delhi—was empty on the day of the violence because “everyone was in Jafrabad.”

• Inquilab focussed on police inaction on its front pages and blamed the cops for not being able to control the violence in Delhi; Dainik Jagran described the police as “poori tarah se asahay”—completely helpless.

• Is truth—at Jagran Prakashan Limited—different in Hindi and Urdu?

• Dainik Jagran and Inquilab, two papers run by the same company from the same office, do not only diverge on the Delhi violence. Reading the two newspapers side by side is to inhabit two different universes.

• When protests could not be linked to violence, they were projected as motivated, brainwashed and propped up by the opposition—and, above all, as unforgivable because they led to traffic jams.

• In fact, the growth of the Hindi-language press in north India has been closely tied with that of Hindutva. What does seem puzzling, however, is the fact that Jagran also publishes an Urdu paper, which seems to reject the Hindutva project. I spoke to several editors, reporters, the Jagran group staff and insiders from the Urdu-news industry to understand why Jagran runs Inquilab.

• Inquilab comes with a long history and a large Muslim readership. It gives control to Jagran over what a large body of Urdu-speaking consumers read. And while there is presently a disjoint with the ideology of Dainik Jagran, there is always the possibility of moulding opinion slowly.

• The fates of Hindi and Hindutva have been intertwined, not least due to their shared pan-nationalistic ambitions. Just like Dainik Jagran, most newspapers of the Hindi areas of north India came up before Independence to propagate the nationalist movement. Even then, most owners of Hindi newspapers were closely aligned with the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha.

• In fact, English dominated even the Hindi-press market, because many big English-language proprietors started Hindi dailies of their own. For example, Bennett and Coleman, which ran the Times of India, started Navbharat Times from Delhi in 1950. However, until the 1970s, these Hindi papers were mostly translations of their English counterparts.

• The English press was “sabotaging the development of the Hindi Press,” the owner and editor of Dainik Jagran at the time, Narendra Mohan Gupta, said in a 1970 interview. “The government recognises only the English Press.”

• In a 1996 paper, the academics Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma wrote that, during the Emergency, right-wing forces, “and particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, realised the importance of direct intervention in public communication systems and also recognised that, for this, professional talent was imperative.” Thus, from the 1980s, the RSS made an “organised attempt to infiltrate the media and capture top positions.” Jeffrey notes that the proprietorial families of many leading Hindi newspapers—Punjab Kesari, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, Rajasthan Patrika, Rashtriya Sahara—were from merchant castes and came from similar backgrounds as many supporters of the BJP, and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh.

• Aided by the communication revolution, the Hindi press started decentralising at all levels—distribution, production and consumption. The localisation paid attention to the sentiment of the reader. But it also blurred the difference between the journalist and the public. There was little emphasis on production standards, the training of journalists or the gathering and authentication of news. This was not only in contrast with the standards of English journalism but, according to Jeffrey, to most Indian-language newspapers—notably, in Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu and Marathi—which made serious efforts to train staff.

• In fact, the concoction of rising Hindutva, localisation and sensationalism can be best displayed in the example of a report from November 1990 in the Economic Times, which said that many priests of local temples in Ayodhya were acting as stringers.

• Dainik Jagran was based in Uttar Pradesh and Dainik Bhaskar in Madhya Pradesh. In the 1990s, they began expanding in other states as well.

• On 2 November 1991, Jagran’s Lucknow edition claimed that a hundred “kar sevaks” had been killed by “indiscriminate police firing on Ram bhakts.” The next day, the figure was changed to 32. In her book Quest for Power, Zoya Hasan writes that, in its “reports, editorials and published appeals,” Dainik Jagran exhorted readers to take a stand on kar seva.

• On 21 January 1991, the Press Council passed a resolution censuring four Hindi dailies, including Dainik Jagran.

• In 1996, Dainik Jagran’s editor and owner, Narendra Mohan Gupta, was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP.

• In 2002, Dainik Jagran was again pulled up by the Press Council for its reportage on the Gujarat pogrom. One of its headlines had purported that “Do Hazar Logon Ne Chun-Chun Kar ‘Ramsevakon’ Ko Mara”—two thousand people singled out Ram devotees and thrashed them.

• On 12 February 2017, a day after the first of seven phases of the Uttar Pradesh assembly election had ended, Dainik Jagran published exit-poll results projecting victory for the BJP in the state. The publication violated the Election Commission’s ban on exit polls during elections, and an editor was arrested, but Dainik Jagran seems to have been playing for bigger stakes. Analysis of phase-wise data showed that the news successfully misled opposition voters and kept them from consolidating behind a single opposition party or alliance, which could have checked the BJP.

• Clearly, the BJP was in ascendency and would have managed to win quite a lot of seats even without Dainik Jagran’s exit polls. But the newspaper helped the BJP at a time when its victory was not yet a foregone conclusion.

• In a 2004 interview, when asked about the unique selling point of Dainik Jagran and what the daily stands for, Sanjay said, “Primarily, we stand for Indianness or Hindutva.”

• In 2018, regarding the chilling incident of a small girl’s rape in Jammu and Kashmir, it declared on its front page that there was “no rape in Kathua,” contradicting the post-mortem report.

• The success of Inquilab led the Ansari family to start the English tabloid Mid Day, which became central to Bombay’s reading culture. What later became the Midday group also started Midday Gujarati and a radio station.

• When Dainik Jagran was being called out for its biased reportage during the Babri demolition, the Uttar Pradesh correspondent of Inquilab, Nawab Hussain Afsar, became a Central Bureau of Investigation witness in the case.

• In 2010, Jagran Prakashan acquired the Midday group, with all its subsidiaries. While Inquilab might have been small fry in the portfolio of publications that Jagran bought, the former owner of the Midday group, Tariq Ansari, told me that Jagran was specifically interested in Inquilab as well.

• Indeed, within one month of opening its Delhi office, Inquilab was being produced in 12 editions across north India.

• However, instead of expanding the Mumbai Inquilab, which had been getting accolades under Shahid Latif, the Jagran management chose to make a new power centre: in Delhi, under a new editor, Shakeel Shamsi.

• While all resident editors concerning the 12 editions printed in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar report to Shakeel Shamsi, the Mumbai edition under Latif does not. Editors and reporters across Inquilab refer to Inquilab having “12 + 1 editions.”

• According to the 2018–19 numbers listed by the Bureau of Outreach and Communication, the amount of government ads Inquilab has received have more than tripled in value than what it received before Jagran acquired the paper.

• “An impression got made that Urdu readers don’t have purchasing power,” Rizvi explained. “For sixty years, till Manmohan Singh changed it, the government didn’t even include income-tax ads in Urdu papers. They assumed that Urdu people don’t pay taxes.”

• “Sixty to seventy percent of Inquilab’s audience does not know that it is Jagran’s paper,” Rizvi said. “The day they find out circulation will go down. This is the reason they have not put a single board of Inquilab in the Lucknow Jagran office.”

• “Lala log ko karobar chahiye”—the owners just want business—an Inquilab employee told me. “They are businessmen. They have decided a line for their newspaper which is loyal to their people, so let them. What problem do we have? We are also able to say things beneficial to our people. Aap apna likhiye hum apna likh rahen hai”—You write your own thing, we’ll write ours.

• An employee in Inquilab’s marketing team used a food metaphor to describe what Jagran is doing with Inquilab. The purpose was to “sell mangoes to the people who eat mangoes, and grapes to whoever likes grapes,” he said.

• Remarkable in all the conversations with employees—from Dainik Jagran to Inquilab—was how unabashed everyone was about the fact that news is not an act of reporting what happened accurately but something that is curated and created for the reader. “This is a typical post-truth phenomenon,” Musab Iqbal, a media scholar, told me. “Sociologically, there is something changing in the Indian society, which is reflected in the newspapers. News is now an instrument of a certain kind of politics, created to feed certain kinds of audience rather than an instrument of investigation to understand what is going on in society.”

• But how does Inquilab’s criticism of the government—even if it only reaches a primarily Muslim audience—affect Jagran’s Hindutva project? Far from it being an ideological compromise, Iqbal said, “an Urdu newspaper can also keep the boundaries clear. In a way that you should live in your ghetto, and I should live in mine.”

• Bastiwala, however, feels that the Jagran group will eventually tighten its grip on Inquilab. “The way it’s going in India right now, that you can’t say anything, Muslims are being assaulted,” he said. “This is all going as per the RSS’s system. Now, Jagran runs with the RSS’s agenda, so this has to be within their larger intention as well. Or why would they run Inquilab?”